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A captivating account of the formative years of one of Canada’s best-known artists, Jackson’s Wars follows A.Y. Jackson’s education and progress as a painter before he was a well-known artist and his time on the battlefield in Europe, before he cast his lot in with a group of like-minded Toronto artists.Jackson fought many battles: he was a feisty and opinionated combatant when he crossed swords with critics, collectors, museums, galleries, and fellow painters as an emerging artist. Moving from...

This handsomely produced volume, featuring 128 full-page color illustrations, showcases a wide-ranging selection of the most outstanding works from Canada’s largest art museum. Each of the pieces chosen for inclusion is introduced by a curatorial specialist, who sets it in its historical context and comments on its meaning and its place in the artist’s oeuvre. Pride of place is given to the Gallery’s unparalleled holdings in Canadian art, but European art—paintings, sculptures, prints, and dra...

Millicent Mary Chaplin was the wife of Lieutenant Colonel Thos. Chaplin of the Coldstream Guards, and accompanied him to Quebec in 1838. During the next four years the Chaplins traveled widely in Upper and Lower Canada and the United States and met an extraordinary variety of people, including Lafontaine, Georges Etienne Cartier, John Beverly Robinson, and William Allan. Her diary offers perspectives of New York and American manners, Toronto, Kingston, Montreal, Quebec, the Maritimes, and Niag...

In the 1930s, the exciting urban environment of Montreal provided the perfect venue for a varied group of people who came together to form a kind of "salon" in the turmoil of the Great Depression. For ten years, these friends and acquaintances met each week at the home of the artist John Lyman. They saw themselves as "modern," a part of the avant-garde that was then busily changing the world. These Canadian modernists supported left-wing causes, advocated a more stable social order, and heralded...

Mandated to foster a sense of national cohesion The National Film Board of Canada's Still Photography Division was the country's official photographer during the mid-twentieth century. Like the Farm Security Administration and other agencies in the US, the NFB used photographs to serve the nation. Division photographers shot everything from official state functions to images of the routine events of daily life, producing some of the most dynamic photographs of the time, seen by millions of Canad...

How do artists in Toronto visualise their sense of place? Are there particular 'made-in-Toronto' ways of thinking about the city? With work selected by internationally renowned Toronto-based artist Luis Jacob, Form Follows Fiction: Art and Artists in Toronto considers the ways in which artists visualise Toronto, throughout a period of fifty years. Presenting a thematic clustering of works by 86 artists, the book is premised on the tendency of artists in the city to favour performative and alleg...

This book examines the various figures and interests involved in the design and construction of the Canada Pavilion and explores how it was used over the past sixty years to exhibit the work of Canadian artists and architects. This publication intends not only to underline the pavilion's importance in the broader context of modern architecture, but also to highlight its role as an early example of cultural diplomacy. The book is fully endowed with archive material, such as photographs, drawings...

The art of Gerard Collins resists categorisation. Over a 50-year career, Collins’s conceptual imagination and dizzying array of influences has produced a body of work as eclectic as it is stimulating. His oeuvre, ranging from still lifes to landscapes, from realism to neo-conceptualism, remains undeniably embedded in Saint John, while partaking in — and pushing against — national and international conversations about art and theory. Featuring over 75 reproductions of Collins’s work, including...

In this first book-length study of the internationally renowned Canadian artist Char Davies, Laurie McRobert examines the digital installations Osmose and Ephémère in the context of Davies' artistic and conceptual inspirations. Davies, originally a painter, turned to technology in an effort to create the effect of osmosis between self and world. By donning a head-mounted display unit and a body vest to monitor breathing and balance, participants are immersed in 3D-virtual space where they intera...

Lawren S. Harris is best known for his iconic landscape paintings that declare a sense of cool Canadian resilience. Yet, in the 1920s, an audacious and more colourful interior world began to emerge in his work, and by 1934, the patriotic landscape painter had taken a seemingly unexpected turn toward a transnational career in abstract painting. The social, intellectual, and aesthetic milieu of American transcendentalism shaped a movement of abstract art across North America, seen in the paintings...

A career-spanning retrospective of one of the masters of North American cartooningThe first of a historic two-volume set, The Collected Doug Wright: Canada's Master Cartoonist presents the first-ever comprehensive look at the life and career of one of the most-read and best-loved cartoonists of the 1960s. Compiled in cooperation with Doug Wright's family, it draws from thousands of pieces of art, pictures, letters, and the artist's own journals to provide a fully rounded view of Wright, both as...

The Thomson Collection contains examples of the highest quality of most types of medieval ivory carving, both secular and religious. These include large statuettes of the Virgin and Child intended to stand on altars in chapels, small versions for private use in the home, and folding tablets or diptychs with scenes from the life of Christ carved in relief.